I may need to explain. "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" was a novella by Gene Wolfe, published in Orbit 10 in 1972. Later that year, it became the first third of the fix-up novel The Fifth Head of Cerberus, along with two other novellas - "'A Story,' by John V. Marsch" and "V.R.T." - that were original to the book version.
The novella "Fifth Head" is narrated in the first person by a young man on a human colony planet, a few hundred years in the future. We never learn his name, but I think we're supposed to be able to deduce it. (My cynical theory is that it is "Gene Wolfe," because his author was, even that young, more self-satisfied than any one person ever should be.) The novella is mostly about figuring out who this boy is, and how he related to the rest of his odd family: his scientist/brothel-keeper "father" and reclusive "aunt" and, least important, his "brother."
The novel is about the aboriginal race that inhabited a neighboring planet before humans arrived - whether they actually ever existed, whether they still do, whether they are the shape-shifters popular legend makes them out to be, whether the humans of these two worlds are actually, or partially, transformed aboriginals.
The boy in the first story is pretty comprehensively not an abo - there's a secret there, as there always is with Wolfe, but it's a more standard SFnal secret, and signposted clearly early on in the novella. So his story starts the novel, and sets everything in motion, but he and his concerns disappear at the end of his story, staying entirely as background for the other two pieces.
To explain a bit more: Sainte Croix and Sainte Anne are sister planets, circling a common center, both very Earth-like worlds of a star that is never specified. They were settled by "the French," and, not even a generation later, some other group from Earth came, conquered or massacred "the French," and set up separate polities on the two planets that are now in something of a Cold War with each other. We don't know who the other group was; it doesn't seem to matter. That the initial group was French does seem to matter, for no clear reason. (It may just be that they were Catholic, like Wolfe himself: he can never get away from that.)
Sainte Anne - the other planet, the one the boy does not live on - was the home of the Shadow Children, the abos, the Annese. They were pointedly not tool-users - one way, supposedly, to tell a transformed abo is that his hands are clumsy, that he's not good at tools, that he can't write clearly. They lived there, in small hunter-gatherer bands, before the coming of humans, fighting each other in small ways and having an elaborate cosmology that varied a lot between the warring groups.
'A Story' is an aboriginal legend - or one created after the fact by humans, or something in between those two possibilities - written down by the title character, who also appeared in "Fifth Head." Marsch was an anthropologist from Earth, doing his graduate field world on Sainte Anne, researching the possibly-mythical abos. He visited the Sainte Croix brothel the main character of "Fifth Head" grew up in, during the action of that novella - pointedly, after doing three years of field work, out in the bush of Sainte Anne.
Marsch is the main character of the novel, as much as anyone is. Or, to be more specific, the person claiming to be Marsch is the main character, and understanding who and what he is is the point of the book.
That third novella, "V.R.T.," is mostly a document dump. An unnamed - if you read Wolfe, you have to be able to minimize your annoyance at all the things he hides or avoids, all his all-too-obvious look-at-me clevernesses - officer of the Sainte Croix government is examining the records of a prisoner, to make a determination of his final fate.
That prisoner is Marsch, or was posing as him. The title of the novella is the initials of a young man who worked for Marsch, doing field-work on Sainte Anne. That boy is Victor Trenchard - the first name given only once, the last name mentioned probably four or five times, in a shocking flood of helpfulness to the reader from Wolfe. (If there was a clue as to his middle name, I missed it.)
Victor's father claimed to be an abo; he is almost certainly a liar. Victor says he is half-abo; that may in fact be true. And the person in prison on Sainte Croix - who the authorities think is an impostor, a spy sent by the Saint Annese authorities and implicated in a murder that happens in "Fifth Head" - is either Marsch himself, the man from Earth, or Victor, transformed to resemble him, taking over his life after his mysterious death in the outback of Sainte Anne.
(It is not difficult to figure out which is true. Wolfe occasionally does make some things clear.)
Fifth Head is deep and interesting and a marvelous puzzle. It's also deeply self-indulgent and often too clever by half. Even this early in his career, Wolfe made no effort to treat women as human beings, or to explain any of the things in his stories he didn't feel like explaining. In the end, it's the kind of labyrinth that endlessly circles itself: there's no real center to this puzzle, no moment of enlightenment, so unless the journey itself is worthwhile to the reader, it will fall flat. I found the journey worthwhile, the puzzle interesting and intricate: but it was a close thing, and Wolfe's obvious right-wing Catholicism (of the "they might as well all die, and the few that aren't utter sinners will be redeemed" variety) is less appealing the clearer I see it.
Wolfe is one of the most obvious "your mileage will vary" writers in the SFF world. I don't know that I'd recommend any woman read him; he is so male and so misogynist (that's not quite the right word: Wolfe doesn't hate women, he just doesn't understand or see or value them as anything like the thing he believes himself to be). But he is fascinating, especially in his best work. And this is one.
No comments:
Post a Comment